Motrin’s Mommy Headache: A Lesson in Social Media Experimentation

Johnson & Johnson thought it would be a no-brainer to post a short video as the leading edge of an ad campaign for Motrin that was aimed at young mothers. Instead, its online gambit drew a fast and furious backlash from its intended audience, and the company decided to kill the entire campaign in its infancy.

It didn’t have to be that way.

The Motrin ad used an irreverent tone to identify with young moms and the back pain associated with lugging infants in baby carriers. But it struck the wrong cord with some and drew fire on Twitter and from a small cadre of "mommy bloggers" — the most vocal members of the demographic J&J was trying to woo.

To make matters worse, the video was only a minor piece of a campaign created by independent agency Taxi, New York, and was nothing more than a mashup of some of the creative that was to be deployed in print and television advertising as a welcome video to the brand’s website.

The less-than 50-second video went largely unnoticed for 45 days. Once the criticism began, however, it quickly reached a social media fever pitch. The first critiques of the ad surfaced on November 15 a Saturday. By
Sunday afternoon the #motrinmoms topic had trended to high popularity on Twitter and Blogger Katja Presnal had created a nine minute YouTube video comprised of angry tweets and moms with baby carriers. By Sunday evening, Motrin pulled the campaign and temporarily shuttered its website.

The furor was minor in the grand scheme of things. Twitter has, by one estimate, about 3 million users and only about 1,000 have posted anything with the #motrin tag since the debacle unfolded.

Brands are delicate things, but social tools exist not only to hear bad news but to engage even that part of the crowd which has made it clear you have tripped up — maybe, especially that niche.

"These tools allow advertisers to listen to what people are saying —
and can provide free, instant feedback before they buy marketing efforts in traditional media," says Jeremiah Owyang, Senior Analyst at
Forrester Research. "But brands have to make sure they understand the medium and how it’s different. The consumers are in charge here. And as much as brands are doing the talking, they have to do as much listening."

The women who reacted to the Motrin ad were a small minority. But they were vocal, and exactly who J&J needed to heed to refine its message.

In our view the ad was not overtly disrespectful (no disrespect to the mommy bloggers). It was a misjudgment of tone rather than a direct insult to mothers who use baby carriers. And as soon as the blogger uproar rose above a din, other Internet denizens rose up to criticize them and defend Motrin. Twitterers, angry men on YouTube and video parodists all chimed in.

"If [Motrin] better understood the nature of social networking, this could have been a different story," says Dan Gould, Senior Editor at trends and innovation agency PSFK.

Had Motrin joined the debate, or allowed offended mothers to offer suggestions on how to right the problem, they could have likely moved on without trashing all of the time and money already sunk into the campaign.

"They pulled into their shell instead of redirecting their energy," says Owyang. "But they could have leveraged the weight of the negative energy into something that would have benefited the brand."

Motrin tried to adapt its reaction to the audience it had engaged, but the company wasn’t prepared to react in real time. They had no Twitter presence when it happened and took a nuclear corporate approach. An early statement from Motrin read:

"We have taken immediate action to respond to these concerns and have removed the advertisement from our Web site… Unfortunately it will take longer for us to remove this advertisement from magazines, as several are currently on newsstands and in distribution."

By November 20th, the brand’s response on the site had shifted to better address its audience. Kathy Widmer, Vice President of Marketing for McNeil Consumer Healthcare penned a new apology that began:

"So…it’s been almost 4 days since I apologized here for our Motrin advertising. What an unbelievable 4 days it’s been. Believe me when I say we’ve been taking our own headache medicine here lately!"

Jessica Gottlieb, one of the original bloggers who took offense to the ad, didn’t even think it should have been pulled. She wrote on her blog:

"Did Motrin really need to take the ad down? No, I don’t think so.

Yes, I really did say that. Much has been written about how the company (and every brand and every person) ought to monitor their reputation online."

Upset bloggers may be a vocal bunch, but they are often easily appeased (with attention, or as Gottlieb notes on her blog, free stuff). If Motrin had been less scared of the mommy blowback and been willing to talk it out online, they might have gotten a better campaign as a result of it, instead of no campaign at all.